Many online platforms have proliferated in the past decade such as Uber and Airbnb, enabling individuals to operate outside traditional structures, with minimal bureaucracy, regulated working time or interference from bosses. It is estimated that four per cent of the UK workforce provides a service through the “gig”, “on-demand” economy, across a broad range of sectors. Such jobs also come without a guaranteed living wage, paid holiday, access to pensions, insurance or healthcare schemes, minimum or maximum working hours, or the security of a steady salary.
We are used to thinking of employment as a two-way contract which guarantees the worker, in return for their regular labour, enough remuneration for a reasonable standard of life. Recent research by the New Economics Foundation, however, found that two in every five people currently employed in the UK are in work that fails to provide a secure living wage.
As apps and automation reconfigure work, what happens to how we think about “the working class”? The communities of manual and semi-skilled workers required by industrial capitalism, who formed most of British society throughout the 20th century, now largely languish in communities defined by their lack of work and reliance on benefits.
Casual and precarious conditions have always existed for many workers. Job security, promotions and pensions have always been scarcer for those less able to access secure full-time employment. The UK’s transition to capitalism saw agricultural work fall from 80 per cent of employment in mediaeval Britain to less than one per cent today, while artisan craftwork gave way to mechanised and specialised production in factories.
The UK’s current record low unemployment figures mask many problems. Since the 2008 financial crisis, more than 40pc of job growth has been through self-employment, while agency work has grown by 46pc. Self-employed workers are not guaranteed the minimum wage, and their numbers are rising. The UK also has one million workers on zero-hours contracts characterised by their lack of a guaranteed number of hours of work per week.
Technology has eroded the old world of work whilst at the same time a driver of the emergent economy. Contracts and communication built around smartphone apps and online hubs have challenged the need for offices, payroll structures, career progression and other fundamentals of 20th-century capitalism. Caught between the removal of steady work that pays a living wage and the political and cultural push towards individualism many are working themselves towards exhaustion and ill health.
We are conditioned from an early age to see work as something that can provide us with control, security, pride and purpose. For many of us, some or all such requirements have become unattainable. The rise of automation and its “theft” of jobs has long been resisted by unionised workers, but it also offers an opportunity to rethink the basis of work and to resolve its unsatisfactory and alienating aspects. We may arrive at a post-work future, no longer built around low-paid and insecure drudgery, where we can find alternative channels of meaning and fulfilment and cease to regard ourselves as workers above all else.